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Osama, China, and America

“Next up: Kim Jong Il,” a commentator wrote on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, on Monday afternoon, as news spread that the United States had killed Osama bin Laden. Another Chinese Web user watching Americans celebrate observed: “Bin Laden had religious zeal that we don’t have; America has a national spirit, and we don’t have that either.”

Bin Laden was always something of a mystery to the Chinese. Religious fanaticism can be difficult to picture if you’re a Chinese believer inclined to pick and choose the most pragmatic precepts from Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. But, a decade ago, when the 9/11 attacks occurred, sympathy in China was curiously muted. At the time, China had endured so much war and political upheaval that casualties in New York were slow to strike a chord. “I didn’t really feel sad,” a factory clerk, told Peter Hessler, my predecessor in China, at the time. “I admit that I’ve always had a prejudice against America, because it’s so powerful and it always uses its power in other parts of the world. But the more I thought about what happened, the more sympathy I felt for all those innocent people.”

It’s been a long decade for China and the U.S.; today, Chinese corporations and military forces are scattered around the globe, exposing them to the risks and resentments that once attached almost exclusively to symbols of American power. The Web has connected four hundred million Chinese to the world on a scale difficult to predict a decade ago, humanizing former enemies but also revealing their own country to them in new light. I’ve often heard Chinese friends muse that China’s unimpeded rise over the past decade owed, in a small, strange way, to the fact that the U.S. was so preoccupied with Islamic terrorism that it didn’t have time to notice.

As news spread Monday, there was some celebration on the Chinese Web, but also a note of chilliness toward the U.S. than I didn’t anticipate. Zhang Xin, the director of the China Central Television’s National Security and Military Channel posted of bin Laden: “As a billionaire, he didn’t want to live a comfortable life, but chose to challenge the superpower, chose to live the life of a caveman. What was he trying to do? Laden was the greatest national hero in Arab history. Using his own power to fight the most powerful country in the world, America….Whether Laden is dead for real or not, it’s not important anymore. He has already become a spirit, an anti-American system of thought.”

Conspiracy theories and anxiety about the U.S. have a long life in Chinese security circles, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. More striking is a dark parable that was circulating fast on Monday afternoon, the kind of viral shred of cynicism that could never have spread in 2001:

Al Qaeda once sent five terrorists to China: One was sent to blow up a bus, but he wasn’t able to squeeze onto it; one was sent to blow up a supermarket, but the bomb was stolen from his basket; one was sent to blow up a train, but tickets were sold-out; finally, one succeeded in bombing a coal mine, and hundreds of workers died. He returned to Al Qaeda’s headquarters to await the headlines about his success, but it was never reported by the Chinese press. Al Qaeda executed him for lying.